I think what they are trying to do is make gear more random, more like the D3 model. A piece of gear might be Lwarforged" it might have a socket, it might give bonus sppeed or cleave. And with reforging gone, you do nned to think about if that piece with crit is good for you or not.

Hit and expertise are a legacy from the days of weapon skills. Good riddance. If you just need an addon to calculate the optimal level, it's not interesting or good for the game.

On the other hand, haste caps do seperate good players from great players, hopefully those stay.

Hopefully the gems and enchants will be more inteesting.

Amirya wrote:... because everyone needs a Catagonskin rug.

twinkfist wrote:i feel bad for the Mogu...having to deal with alcoholic bears.

I actually really like this. Lets face it, gearing has become really boring, the numbers have gotten ridiculous and having to gem, enchant, reforge and valor upgrade everything each time is a very expensive and lengthy ritual. Having items with fun new stats and procs is the way to go instead of incremental upgrades each tier. This along with the item squish is the itemisation overhaul the game desperately needed.

I may actually pick up my paladin as a tank this next expac, instead of a part time healer.

I guess my burning question for 4am is, do I keep going with my shaman as first 100 in WoD, or do I pick up the paladin again?

Hmmmm......

Fetzie wrote:The Defias Brotherhood is back, and this time they are acting as racketeers in Goldshire. Anybody wishing to dance for money must now pay them protection money or be charged triple the normal amount when repairing.

They say they're going to try to get the expansion out faster this time, and that there won't be any more MoP content because it would delay the expac. So I wouldn't at all be surprised if there's another 10-12 months of Siege of Orgrimmar.

"All future raids on normal/heroic difficulty will be cross realm enabled on release"

Hey that's prett-

"Each difficulty level will have it's own lockout!"

I'm surprised there's not more chatter about this. Also the inability to change difficulty on the fly. That means no more working on heroic(mythic) progression, then ratcheting down a difficulty to finish the clear for gear.

Which means if you do the first 4 bosses in Mythic, you have to go back and do all 10 in heroic to farm gear. This strikes me as being an absurd increase in raid time. For a 12-hr a week guild this makes my head hurt.

They did make an off-hand comment about "clear wing X times, get key to skip thing," so maybe killing a boss in Mythic will give you the option to skip it on Heroic.

We'll see how it shakes out, but I'd really like to see them explicitly address this.

Also flex *still* doesn't do anything for "casual heroic guilds," since we're still going to have roster and bench issues, except with 20 people it's a marginally larger logistical headache.

They made a big deal about being able to go in with your friends and help them out on another difficulty; I'm hoping this means raids will be more bosses and less trash; sub-10min boss fights with 15 minutes of trash between bosses seems unbalanced. To be fair the SoO trash seems really reasonable, compared to, say, ToT.

fuzzygeek wrote:They made a big deal about being able to go in with your friends and help them out on another difficulty; I'm hoping this means raids will be more bosses and less trash; sub-10min boss fights with 15 minutes of trash between bosses seems unbalanced. To be fair the SoO trash seems really reasonable, compared to, say, ToT.

How did you feel about the Dragon Soul trash (or rather the almost complete lack thereof)?

As a raid leader it was nice to just get on with the boss-business, but I do kind of feel that trash packs have their place in raids.Not only for the story and "feel" of the raid, but also as a good way to introduce/prepare for certain boss mechanics.

EDIT: Ignoring the Ultraxion trash, because damn.

"Ask stupid questions. Growth is fuelled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer,not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant."

It is a balance. No trash isn't very good either -- ToGC was, like, what "everyone" was asking for, but it turned the raid into srs business all the time every time. It's hard to say whether it was just being in a room, or the lack of trash that made that raid feel so soul-suckingly horrible.

Some trash is good -- it's nice to have a bit of downtime, and some of my fondest memories are things that happened while we were shitting around on vent during trash.

Trash that introduces fight mechanics: good. Small packs of challenging trash can also be fun -- bonus points if they become mini-bosses and actually award loot or valor or something other than "I've just sucked X minutes of your life away. Tell me, how do you feel?"

Calling a raid 30 minutes early because "we don't have time to clear the trash and kill the boss" is pretty stupid. 15 minute cut-off much more reasonable.

fuzzygeek wrote:... some of my fondest memories are things that happened while we were shitting around on vent during trash.

That's very true!

The downtime aspect might be the best point about having some trash, other than the light introduction to mechanics.At least for more serious raiders, trash and farm bosses is basically where people unwind and mess around.Where it's ALMOST OKAY for your hunter to misdirect pull onto the healer, and for the Paladin tank to bubble-hearth.

fuzzygeek wrote:Small packs of challenging trash can also be fun -- bonus points if they become mini-bosses and actually award loot or valor or something

Yeah. Especially in a non-linear raid, because it allows for trash farming - which is actually a nice thing for the highly casual groups. I know my aunt (who runs a super-causal guild) really misses trash farm runs, like we had in BoT (despite it's linear layout) and to some degree Firelands. They were a nice way for sub-normal raid groups to get their hands on a few beneficial item upgrades, and if they can learn some boss mechanics along the way then that's superb!

"Ask stupid questions. Growth is fuelled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer,not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant."

I really like how they re-use Holy Shield every time they have no idea for a prot paladin talent xD "Let's give em Holy Shield back ... and get rid of it in 6 month ... and give it back in one year ..."

I've decided that I'm not even gonna worry about what they do with raids. As much as I love being a heroic raider I've already thrown in the towel due to RL and quite frankly the fact that I just don't care as much about raiding anymore.

Still gonna buy the expansion but I'm not fumbling my life for raiding anymore.

Teranoid wrote:I've decided that I'm not even gonna worry about what they do with raids. As much as I love being a heroic raider I've already thrown in the towel due to RL and quite frankly the fact that I just don't care as much about raiding anymore.

Still gonna buy the expansion but I'm not fumbling my life for raiding anymore.

That's where I am now. Have to admit I miss it, though. At least MoP and WoD feel like fairly solid expansions to play in a casual manner.

"Ask stupid questions. Growth is fuelled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer,not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant."

Not sure where to put this, but I have one huge annoyance regarding the way the raids and lockouts are structured in WoD.

T9 meets Dragon Soul. Burnout will be extreme for Mythic raiders at the top end. It's going to be madness.

It was bad enough having to clear multiple normal modes with alts feeding gear to them, but at least it was limited to the number of alts people had. In WoD we'll have no lockouts so you bring 1 main and 24 alts to the new "heroic" mode and feed all the gear to this main, then repeat 19 times until everyone had their chance 5 pieces of gear per boss. On top of this, we also have the new "normal" mode to repeat it with....

If people in top end guilds really do that for 25 people (thus running several istances of the raid 25 times per week) I'm very glad I quitted hardcore raiding in Wotlk.

theckhd wrote:Fuck no, we've seen what you do to guilds. Just imagine what you could do to an entire country. Just visiting the US might be enough to make the southern states try to secede again.

halabar wrote:Noo.. you don't realize the problem. Worldie was to negative guild breaking energy like Bolvar is to the Scourge. If Worldie is removed, than someone must pick up that mantle, otherwise that negative guild breaking energy will run rampant, destroying all the servers.

Teranoid wrote:I've decided that I'm not even gonna worry about what they do with raids. As much as I love being a heroic raider I've already thrown in the towel due to RL and quite frankly the fact that I just don't care as much about raiding anymore.

Still gonna buy the expansion but I'm not fumbling my life for raiding anymore.

That's where I am now. Have to admit I miss it, though. At least MoP and WoD feel like fairly solid expansions to play in a casual manner.

Same. I had sworn off WoW when I stopped Hc raiding, but the casual-heavy help makes me think I'll see if we keep doing Flexes on MT and just raid that way when I can.

When that day comes, seek all the light and wonder of this world, and fight.

KysenMurrin wrote:They say they're going to try to get the expansion out faster this time, and that there won't be any more MoP content because it would delay the expac. So I wouldn't at all be surprised if there's another 10-12 months of Siege of Orgrimmar.

WoD is a lot farther along than most realize.

The rest of this year we'll get a regular stream of info, and beta in January.

Most of the big features are pretty much done btw.

My prediction as to when we see WoD released is April.

~~~~~~

We saw very few examples of loot. The few we saw showed some of the new affixes like movement speed on boots & cleave on gloves. They did not talk a lot about professions. We did get the info about no meta gems, only 1 gem slot on drops that do have a slot, More enchants but only useable for a few types of items. It does look like there will be another legendary like we have with cloaks, and a much rarer one. Quest rewards that may roll as rare or even epic.

We saw almost no mention of PvP changes.

Obviously we'll see new racials.

In case you missed it no dailies to speak of, but all of the zones will have elements we saw in timeless isle.

They did mention leveling to 100 will be a lot less of a grind, and in fact called it as a romp to 100.

And I know some people were talking about having problems getting gold as of lately since Timeless Isle provides so little.

o/

though i think i just need to start clearing old raids again and selling all the loot, decent return on time

Brekkie:Tanks are like shitty DPS. And healers are like REALLY distracted DPSAmirya:Why yes, your penis is longer than his because you hit 30k dps in the first 10 seconds. But guess what? That raid boss has a dick bigger than your ego. Flex:I don't make mistakes. I execute carefully planned strategic group wipes.Levie:(in /g) It's weird, I have a collar and I dont know where I got it from, Worgen are kinky!Levie:Drunk Lev goes and does what he pleases just to annoy sober Lev.Sagara:You see, you need to *spread* the bun before you insert the hot dog.